Calling for a review of the nuclear power programme

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Nuclear Waste

Low and medium level waste from Koeberg is dumped at Vaalputs. The people who live around Vaalputs were not consulted when this site was selected.

About once a week a truck containing radioactive waste travels from Koeberg to Vaalputs.

The high level waste a a very real source of concern. Koeberg produces about 30 tons of high level waste per year, and all of it is currently stored at Koeberg – over 1000 tons. If not stored properly, The waste can melt, and also ‘go critical’, which would result in a nuclear explosion.

This is despite the instruction from the Department of the Environment [Ref: 12/12/20/944] that “waste disposal … must be described in detail” and that “The long term storage of high level nuclear waste must be addressed”. The EIA consultants have ignored this instruction. When questioned in public (I have this on video) the consultants begrudgingly answered that they considered “long term” to mean about 60 years… and the waste is dangerous for thousands of years!

Nuclear power does emit CO2, if one considers the constructions, mining, fuel fabrication, waste transport and disposal and plant decommissioning. It emits less than coal, but more than renewable energy. Renewable energy wins on all counts.

‘go critical’, lol best read ever you guys have no nuclear theory behind you. You jsut read stuff on the paper and read some green peace sites and believe anything you read. Let me make some facts straight. Nuclear waste will never explode. The explosions that come with handling waste is because of pressure and not nuclear explosions. There has never been a accidental nuclear explosion from a nuclear power plant. Only radiation waste leaking through a steam explosion or some other aspect. Go lean nuclear physics to get a understanding of what you are trying to fight against before spouting your stupidity online.

Thanks for taking the time to comment Ludger. However, ignoring the personal attack, your statements are not consistent with the facts. There was an accidental nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl plant, for example. Also, there is much uncertainty about what exactly happened at Fukushima, and one likely possibility is that the spent fuel (aka high level waste) which was stored in the reactor building melted and caused a criticality.

In terms of Koeberg, the danger of criticality in the spent fuels was raised in an internal report produced by the plant operator, in which is was stated that the new spent fuel had to be placed in a checkerboard pattern to avoid such criticality.

At Fukushima Dai’ichi, the concern was/is “hot” fuel rods removed from the reactor cores and their initial cooling pools high up in the reactor buildings, where rods being placed spatially too close together can cause a criticality. “Hot” spent fuel rods removed from the reactor are “nuclear waste”. Admittedly, low level nuclear waste is very very unlikely to go spontaneously critical because it is too spatially diluted with other non-radioactive materials.

It has been proposed that a Thorium LFTR can burn nuclear waste (see Copenhagen Atomics web-site). If South Africa were to build new nuclear reactors, it would be much better to collaborate with China developing Thorium LFTR, rather than buying outdated and dangerous solid-fuel-rod reactors that have concurrent risk of explosion and high radiation by-product toxicity. At Fukushima Dai’ichi, there is estimated circa 100000 tonnes of nuclear waste in storage on site – in an area prone to flooding when tsunamis occur.